The Film Was Already Bleeding Before I Sat Down
I watched Evil Dead Burn in a Singapore cinema with one small, slightly paranoid thought already lodged in the back of my head: please do not let this have been cut to ribbons before the Deadites even get started.
That is the odd local bargain with extreme horror. You buy the ticket, sit through the trailers, watch the classification card, and some small part of you wonders whether the film has already been politely taken into a back room and asked to behave itself.
The Singapore listing I found had Evil Dead Burn as R21, released on 9 July 2026 through Sony Pictures Releasing Singapore, with a local running time of 1 hour 56 minutes. Most international listings give the film as roughly 110 minutes. That discrepancy is interesting, but it is not proof of local censorship, and I could not find a reliable source confirming additional Singapore-specific cuts. Director Sébastien Vaniček has, however, said that one particularly harsh sequence was trimmed to avoid an NC-17 in the US; he was clear that the scene remained in the film, only shortened and adjusted.
So perhaps I was worrying about the wrong pair of scissors.
I am a huge Evil Dead fan, which does not mean I approach these films calmly. I come with expectations, suspicion, affection and the hope that whoever has been handed the keys understands that Evil Dead is not merely gore. It is rhythm, texture, cruelty, slapstick, panic, invention and the horrible joke of a universe that keeps punishing people for reading aloud.
Did I like Burn?
Yes.
Also, no.
Mostly, I could not look away.
That is still the simplest way I can put it. Burn belongs to the harsher branch of the family tree established by Evil Dead (2013) and Evil Dead Rise: more bruising than gleeful, more interested in sustained punishment than the demonic funhouse timing of Sam Raimi’s original trilogy. There were moments when I admired its nerve. There were moments when I wanted it to stop. There were moments when the audience around me seemed to shift as one organism, quietly deciding whether we were entertained, assaulted or both.
Very healthy behaviour, obviously.
A New House, Same Terrible Book
Evil Dead Burn is the sixth feature film in the series, directed by French filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček and written by Vaniček with Florent Bernard. Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert produced it, with Bruce Campbell among the executive producers. The production was shot in Aotearoa New Zealand, where the New Zealand Film Commission has highlighted the film’s heavy use of local crews across practical effects, stunts, prosthetics, construction and production design.
Vaniček came to the franchise after Infested, his 2023 spider-horror film, and the choice makes sense almost immediately. Infested was all pressure, corners, stairwells and bodies trapped in spaces that keep becoming less safe. Burn takes that same instinct and gives it a more famous curse, a larger toolbox and an entire family’s worth of emotional damage.
The premise is simple enough. Alice, played by Souheila Yacoub, is mourning her husband Will and joins his family at their secluded home. The gathering becomes the promised family reunion from hell as the Deadite curse starts turning grief, resentment and old domestic rot into physical catastrophe.
Like Rise, the film turns the curse inward. The evil is not merely something outside the door. It moves through family loyalty, denial, abuse and the things people agree not to say because saying them would damage the story they have built about themselves.
The old franchise machinery is here — the Book of the Dead, recordings, inherited research, the Kandarian Dagger and the familiar suggestion that somebody before us took careful notes when they really should have been running. The film ties Joseph’s grandfather to Professor Raymond Knowby and expands that connection through the Circle of Wise Men, but it does not spend so much time explaining the mythology that the curse starts to resemble office paperwork.
That is about the right amount of lore for me. I like Evil Dead mythology up to the point where it still feels cursed rather than organised. The book should never feel like a franchise database. It should feel like something you do not touch without gloves, a priest and perhaps a second career.
The Family Was Rotten Before the Deadites Arrived
The most useful idea in Burn is that possession does not create the Price family’s ugliness. It exposes it.
Will was abusive to Alice before he became supernatural trouble. His family knew more than they wanted to admit, and their instinct was to protect the family story rather than the person being hurt by it. Once the Deadites arrive, the metaphor is hardly subtle, but subtlety has never been the franchise’s natural habitat. The curse simply gives the existing damage teeth.
Souheila Yacoub is the reason that idea lands as often as it does. Alice could easily have become a generic final girl with a trauma file attached. Instead, Yacoub keeps her guarded, irritated, exhausted and occasionally unreadable. She is grieving, but not in the way her in-laws want her to grieve. She is mourning a man she also needed to escape. That contradiction gives the film something much more interesting than righteous revenge from the first reel.
The best moments are often the quiet ones before the film resumes trying to injure everybody. Alice enters the Price home like someone walking into a room where every object has a memory she would rather not touch. When she finally confronts Susan about what the family knew, the argument works because the Deadite horror is almost secondary. The real wound is older.
Tandi Wright’s Susan is especially effective as the keeper of the family fiction. She does not simply dislike Alice; she protects the version of Will that allows everyone else to remain innocent. Erroll Shand’s Edgar is a more openly unstable source of menace. Hunter Doohan’s Joseph begins as the researcher who thinks information can impose order on the curse, while Luciane Buchanan’s Thya is warmer and less implicated in the family mythology, which makes what happens to her feel particularly mean.
Then there is Maude Davey’s Polly, who drags the film closest to the franchise’s old black-comic cruelty. The material around age and dementia is deliberately uncomfortable, and not all of it worked for me. But Polly also provides the kind of grotesque, ridiculous malice that the rest of the film sometimes forgets it is allowed to enjoy.
Cruelty as House Style
Vaniček wanted to make a brutal Evil Dead film, and he did not exactly hide the ambition. He has described an earlier cut as harsh enough to trigger an NC-17, with one sequence trimmed rather than removed to secure an R rating. Watching the finished film, it is difficult to imagine anybody involved worrying that the audience might leave feeling under-served.
The violence is not the bright-red geyser comedy of Raimi’s most cartoonish moments, nor quite the rain-of-blood operatics of the 2013 film. Burn prefers impact. Household objects, car interiors, sharp corners, tools, doors and furniture become an inventory of very poor ideas.
The car sequence is one of the film’s clearest achievements because the geography remains legible while everything becomes physically horrible. Cars are already good horror spaces: metal boxes full of glass, seatbelts, handles, headrests and not quite enough room to move like a heroic person. Vaniček understands how to turn that design into choreography.
My problem is that intensity eventually becomes its own kind of flatness. Burn is extremely good at hurting people. It is less consistently good at letting fear accumulate before the hurt arrives.
The old Raimi films had an elastic rhythm. They could be disgusting, funny, manic and inventive inside the same breath. Burn is more punishing. It keeps the pressure on so long that the body eventually adjusts. One more wound does not necessarily increase the dread; sometimes it simply becomes the next item on the list.
That is the strange thing about extreme horror. Escalation works only while there is somewhere left to go. Gore has a ceiling, not morally so much as dramatically. Once a film has made almost every object in the room dangerous, suspense has to come from character, silence, timing or surprise.
Objects, Texture, and the Design of Bad Decisions
This is where I found myself watching the film as a designer as much as a horror fan.
Some horror understands that fear often lives in texture: paper, tape, dust, scratched surfaces, mould, badly lit corners, old storage boxes and objects handled by people who are now dead. Evil Dead has always been good at that. The book itself is a design classic of unpleasantness. The Kandarian Dagger is absurd and completely right. The franchise knows that a prop can carry history before anybody explains it.
The Price house works for the same reason. It feels inherited rather than art-directed into existence. The attic is less a lore room than a badly maintained archive of family denial: research, recordings, relics, boxes and things that should have been destroyed rather than labelled.
The production’s New Zealand crews matter here. The Film Commission specifically points to the local practical-effects, prosthetics, stunt, construction and special-effects work, and the film benefits from that tactile confidence. Even when digital work creeps in, the rooms, tools and bodies generally feel like they occupy the same grubby physical world.
Philip Lozano’s cinematography is deliberately drained and cold, and I understand why some viewers have pushed back against the grey-brown palette. There are moments when the visual heaviness starts dulling the very violence it is supposed to intensify. Blood needs contrast. Fire needs darkness, yes, but it also needs something around it to burn against.
When the film does click visually, though, it has real physical confidence. The camera prowls, tilts and occasionally behaves as if it has caught the possession itself. The long movement through the house during the chaos is a good reminder that Vaniček can do more than point at injuries. He understands panic as movement through space.
Music, Memory, and the Marriage Underneath the Horror
The score by Double Danger mostly works as pressure rather than melody, which suits a film that is not especially interested in swagger. More interesting to me is the use of Jacques Brel’s “La Chanson des Vieux Amants”. It belongs to Alice and Will’s relationship, but the film gradually makes the song less romantic than incriminating.
That is a good horror trick: take something sentimental and let the rot show through the varnish.
What the film does not have, at least not in generous supply, is the old musical and tonal lift of classic Evil Dead. No Ash-shaped swagger. No sense that the universe is laughing quite as loudly as it is biting. Burn has jokes, but most of them arrive with blood on their shoes.
What I Missed: the Old Maniac Grin
Modern Evil Dead has reached a strange point where the franchise is now perfectly capable of existing without Sam Raimi directing or Bruce Campbell starring. That is probably healthy. Ash is one of horror’s great characters, but there is only so long you can keep bringing him back before he becomes museum furniture.
I do, however, miss the handmade lunacy.
The Raimi-Campbell films felt as if the filmmaking itself had become infected: camera moves attacking the actors, edits snapping, performances sliding from fear into cartoon possession and then back again. Their cheapness was part of the electricity. They felt made by people solving problems with whatever was nearby and occasionally discovering a style by accident.
The newer films are more polished even when they are filthy. They are more controlled as modern horror objects, which is ironic considering how violent they are. Burn is savage, but it is also engineered. That engineering is often impressive. It can also make me miss the sense that the film itself had gone a bit wrong in public.
That is why my reaction kept splitting in two. I admired the craft while missing the irresponsibility.
The Ending: Fire Is Not Closure
The final act turns Alice’s survival into a reckoning. She confronts Susan over the abuse the family ignored, fights her way through the possessed Prices, uses the Kandarian Dagger, sets the house on fire and still does not get to leave.
Will comes back charred and possessed, because of course he does. The film chases Alice from the burning family home into a nearby construction site, where the imagery becomes industrial: rebar, tar, machinery, a jackhammer and a pit that looks as if the ground itself has decided to join the marriage.
The symbolism is blunt, but I do not mind blunt symbolism when the metaphor has work boots on.
When Alice finally defeats him and the paramedics ask what happened, she says her ex-husband did it. The line works because it covers two histories at once: the carnage we have just watched and the older damage the family spent the film refusing to name.
Then the credits refuse to leave well enough alone.
The mid-credits scene gives Polly one last burst of classic Deadite nastiness, while the final post-credits scene reaches directly back to Evil Dead Rise through Ellie Bixler. I have mixed feelings about that connective tissue. A little continuity is fun. Too much and the Book of the Dead starts looking like a franchise spreadsheet.
Evil Dead should never become tidy.
What Remains After the Blood Dries
I left Evil Dead Burn feeling slightly battered, which seems to be what Vaniček wanted. I also left unsure how much I admired it and how much I had simply endured it.
That is not a dismissal. Some horror is built to be endured. Some horror should make the walk back into the bright cinema corridor feel faintly ridiculous.
As an Evil Dead fan, I am glad the franchise still has enough elasticity to hand itself to a director with a different set of anxieties. As someone who loves the older films’ manic personality, I miss the rude little grin underneath the horror. As someone who liked the severity of 2013 and Rise, I can see exactly where Burn belongs: on the harsher branch of the tree, with less slapstick and more trauma, less “groovy” and more “please stop doing that to a human body”.
I love it and hate it.
That may be the most accurate review I can give.
It is too nasty to be cosy, too committed to dismiss, too uneven to fully embrace and too effective to pretend it did not get under my skin.
I still do not know whether the exact Singapore print I saw differed from the standard theatrical master. I am not going to turn a runtime discrepancy into a censorship conspiracy just because that would make a tidy ending.
Either way, there was enough left.
Enough fire. Enough teeth. Enough family poison. Enough of that old book doing what it always does.
Some franchises invite nostalgia.
Evil Dead waits in the cellar with a tool in its hand.
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